


30 Day Challenge Drabbles

by redonthefly



Category: Captain America (Movies), Frozen (2013), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tarzan (1999), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Chiralities, Exolvo, Frozen Bananas, Multi, Multifandom AU Drabble Meme, So many AUs, redonthefly's 30daychallenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:11:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 15,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2505659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>30 days, 26 letters, 1 multi-fandom drabble extravaganza.  </p><p>Chapter breakdown by fandom:</p><p>Avengers:             Danger, Escape, Modern Woman, Nobody Dances Sober, Transport, Zed<br/>Captain America:  Girls, Health, invictus maneo, Lightening, Patriot, Undead, Veins<br/>Chiralities:            Arabesque, Falling, Skyfall, X-Factor, Your Mileage May Vary<br/>Exolvo:                 Chaser, Wandlore<br/>Frozen:                 Rational Numbers<br/>Frozen AU:           Bananas, Jane, Kiss Me Once, Okay, We're Alright</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Arabesque

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Chiralities: S-Side](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1582751) by [Counterpunch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Counterpunch/pseuds/Counterpunch), [redonthefly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly), [RowanWould](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowanWould/pseuds/RowanWould), [theseerasures](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseerasures/pseuds/theseerasures), [ultranos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultranos/pseuds/ultranos), [whisperwhisk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperwhisk/pseuds/whisperwhisk). 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chiralities universe. S-side.

**Arabesque**

*

"Alright now girls, together now:  _five, six, seven, eight!_ ”

She puts her toes on the line, red heels shined to a high polish, can hear the director’s voice in her ears shouting with the metronome:  _ready, let’s go: step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch! Again!_

The fishnet stockings are pale against her legs - where they even got them is a mystery; Anna hasn’t seen real nylons in  _years_ , and these are gossamer fine things, nude cobwebs that stretch over the smooth muscles of her thighs and calves, one long interrupted line running from her ankle up under her skirt. She’s good at this, in her way.

It’s three hours into rehearsal. They’re working a new set. She’s not tired, but her lipstick is melting. She can taste the petroleum slick in her mouth. 

48 pairs of feet hit the wood floor in time, staccato notes against the orchestra and the swish of satin and tulle. Tap, tap, swish, the horns are blaring the music swelling and she  _turns, turns, touch, down, back, step, pivot, step, walk, walk, walk -_

Arms raised over her head, tall now, she casts a shadow on the stage (it’s bright with turtle polish and wax, there’s the winking reflection of the lights) and this is how it’s going to be now: Anna Rogers in red, white and blue, high heels and lipstick, bright on the stage. 

They gave her this body, and so it’s theirs: crown jewel of the collection.

_Right! Let’s do the whole combination, facing away from the mirror. From the top, fivesixseveneight!_

The director has a voice like a bullhorn; he reminds her a little of the drill sergeants back at Lehigh. This is the closest she’s ever going to come to the war, so she kicks and steps and pirouettes, flashes her smile, ruffles her skirts, licks lipstick off her teeth and imagines the taste of gunpowder on her tongue. 

She can dance now. Elsa would be so surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dance steps are straight out of A Chorus Line because I don't know a thing about dance.


	2. Bananas, 3 Ways

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frozen Bananas is the Tumblr-ship name for Elsa (Frozen) and Jane Porter (Tarzan). They're adorable and addictive.

**Bananas, 3 ways**

*

Elsa’s heard of them, sure. Bananas.  _Ba-na-nah_. It’s the sort of word that stretches out when you say it, rolls with extra syllables off your tongue, like the letters got jumbled up in themselves, an avalanche of sounds out of your mouth.

Bahhhhh-nannnnn-ahhhh.

It doesn’t help; it always sounds silly to her. Like something make-believe. Anna laughed at her and the way she chewed on the word, feeling it out over dinner the night before. Even Kristoff had looked at her oddly, and he is as unflappable a man as Elsa could hope to meet, with a high (so high,  _very_  high) threshold for strangeness.

“It’s your accent,” Anna said, eyes winking in merriment. Her own voice is muffled by the napkin she has pressed against her mouth, cheeks pink and flushed over white linen. “You’re trying to sound like Jane.  _English_.”

“Don’t worry darling,” Jane said, patting her on the arm. “At least you don’t sound French.”

Elsa speaks French. She’s been told her accent is perfectly lovely.

Perhaps she should practice.

She looks in the mirror later, leans over the vanity and stares at her own lips, the way she used to when she was a little girl, holding her head just so.

“ _Croissant._  Bah- _nah_ -nah.”

It needs some work.

*

Arendelle is not, despite what Jane seems to think, lacking in interesting fruits.

“I’ve been to England,” Elsa points out one day. “You boil everything. All I ate was potatoes. And peas.”

“You are not in the right parts of England then. We have apples - “

“So do we,  _obviously_  –“

“And berries – “

“Also here –“

Elsa stops, catches herself tapping her toe, and pushes her straw hat back up on her forehead. They are enjoying one of the last days of an Indian summer, strolling through the quiet acres of apple orchard outside the castle grounds. The air is heavy and sweet with ripe fruit, bees humming drunkenly around the slim trunks, red flashes bright and cheerful in the green and yellowing leaves.

“You miss home,” Elsa says. She is not asking a question.

Jane considers for a moment, rolling an apple absently between her palms, then sighs.

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Did you miss it when you were in Africa?”

(There is a tremor in her voice which she hears, which she hates, and it sounds cold and out of place in this sun-drenched, honey coated maze of trees.)

Jane just levels her a bare look.

“Africa had  _bananas_.”

It’s a pass: a conversational, relationship freebie, and Elsa knows it, and so reaches for Jane’s hand, squeezing it gently in hers.

She’ll take it anyway, while she can. The day is too pretty, the summer too short.

*

Jane has friends in high places. She’s an accomplished travel writer, is published academically in journals around the world, and generally knows the ‘who’s who’ of the scientific community writ large.

Elsa forgets sometimes. It’s easy to do when your wife spends the majority of her working time tucked in far corners of the library, or disappearing into reclusive, secret corners to write, emerging for dinner windswept and wild with untucked hair and ink stains on her fingers, eyes bright and hungry.

Jane has always had an eccentric sort of bent to her, but Elsa likes that; you could say – and people often do – that the queen has made a habit of collecting unusual and luminous minds around her, of holding court with pirates and journeymen, men and women who are mysterious and magical and brilliant. It’s mostly exaggeration, but what isn’t Elsa considers to be only practical.

But Jane is soft and home and  _hers_ , and Elsa doesn’t always remember.

Except for the huge wooden crates appear in her receiving  hall.

When she sees it, Jane actually squeals, and bounces on her toes, delighted and impatient until a guard is fetched and the box opens.

The rooms fills instantly with the thick smell of sugar and straw, cloying almost, that covers Elsa’s throat and makes her teeth ache. Jane, if anything, becomes even more excited, and begins throwing packing straw and hay on the ground with abandon.

After a moment she emerges, one hand fisted around something tubular, and violently yellow.

“ _Bananas_ ,” she breathes, and briskly tears off the pointed end to take a bite of pale fruit. Her eyelids flutter. Elsa considers closing her mouth; it’s hanging open in outright surprise.

“You got them – where?” Elsa leans over the crate, gently pushing aside the straw and breathing through her mouth. It’s overpoweringly sweet.

Jane swallows thickly, then says “My friend Dato’ Sri Anifah Hj sent them.” Elsa blinks.  “From Malaysia,” she continues.  “ _Oh_ , Elsa. We should go. You’ve never  _seen_  such forests…” she trails off, presumably catching the look on Elsa’s face, which, if she had to guess, is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of incredulous.

“You know,” she says, clearly trying a different tactic, “some people consider the banana to be terrible exotic. Even,” she pauses, banana half-way to her mouth again, “ _erotic_. You think?” She waggles her eyebrows.

“No,” Elsa says flatly. “I really don’t.”

To her credit, Jane laughs.


	3. Chaser

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What if Anna and Elsa went to Hogwarts? Well, it'll destroy your heart a little, but that's what the Exolvo 'verse is for. (tagged on Tumblr, definitely go browse through it!)

**Chaser**

*

Ginny catches her in the Gryffindor changing rooms late after practice, hair still dripping two long wet stripes down her back, t-shirt clinging uncomfortably under her robe, pulled on over still-wet skin in her hurry. She doesn’t see Ginny until she’s already levered Harry’s Firebolt out of the team cabinet, set it gently across her knees.

"Sooo," Ginny drawls from the door, "you’re looking for extra practice, or you think you can pick up the speed just by looking at it?" She jolts, stands, feels the broom sliding off her legs, aborts the gesture and sort of falls/heavily sits back on the bench, face blazing. Ginny is smiling at her though, a small smile, not her usual grin, with all its teeth and fierceness. 

"I’ve never seen one in person before," she says, not cowed enough to mumble, not quite bold enough to meet her gaze directly. It’s early in the year still, and she knows the older girl mostly by reputation. Evidently having red hair in this school gets you automatically slotted in as ‘Weasley’, not that Anna minds; she’s a Gryffindor, and ‘Weasley’ means family, a large one, with siblings who tease and smile and pull your braids and sit with you when they see you eating alone.

To her surprise, Ginny slides down on the bench beside her, tucking her knees under the broom’s slim wood handle. “It is a  _beautiful_ broom, isn’t it?” She says quietly, letting one finger trace the cursive outline of the maker’s stamp. “Firebolt. Amazing. Nothing like the old Cleansweep I used to ride.” 

"I learned on a Shooting Star," Anna says. "Older than the school ones, if you can believe it. And slooo-oooow." She drags out the word and punctuates it with a roll of her eyes, and Ginny laughs, head thrown back and hair loose almost to her waist. 

"You don’t even know  _slow_ , Arendelle.” Then, more thoughtfully, “so if you learned on a Shooting Star, who taught you how to ride like  _that?_ " She jerks her head toward the direction of the Quidditch pitch, and Anna bites her lip, isn’t sure how much pride she can show yet, how exhilarated her first practice with a team had felt (a real team, no imagined players in a backyard field), how to articulate that she knows,  _know_ s _,_ the air at Hogwarts is magic - and not the kind that comes from a wand, but which makes flying that much better, that much faster, how the sky is bigger here, and open all for her.

Ginny is looking at her curiously, and she grins. “Stole my sister’s broom when she wasn’t around.”

*

Ginny and Anna get along like a house on fire.

Sometimes people call her ‘Weasley’ in the corridors, mistaken by her small stature and red hair; she finds she does not mind.

On the pitch they’re terror and delight, nearly identical in the sky, red robes and red braids running loops around the clouds, chasing the Quaffle, chasing the Snitch, chasing the thrill of being high, high above the world, giddy with adrenaline and the game.

The first time Harry lets her take up the Firebolt, she rips through the clouds and around the towers, scares a teacher and screams herself hoarse in unabated joy.


	4. Danger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a black widow dangling by herself on a single thread is a deadly thing. a really dangerous thing. - n. edmondson

**Danger**

*

Here’s the thing about webs, which you know. You see them all around you: an unfocused haze in the corners of neglected rooms, glittering with dew in streetlamps and between tree leaves, strung like tinsel in winter, all cold and white with frost.

They’re the perfect metaphor, you think. So many applications. Drawn taut as a violin string poised to sing, or a wisp, thin and airy, a kite to sail on.

You think they are beautiful.

They make other people scream.

(People are so strange. They fear the web; they should be more afraid of the spider.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you aren't reading the latest run of the Black Widow comics, you should be.


	5. Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I just really wanted to write about Clint stealing a car.

**Escape**

*

Natasha is waiting for him in an alley between Third and Jefferson. Clint circles the block twice before she emerges from behind a set of dumpsters and pallets. Alley debris - it’s so refreshingly familiar, always the same. 

He is  _not_  going to get nostalgic about garbage. SHIELD means working some truly shit jobs, but this isn’t  _that_ bad. (Yet.)

In any case, she slinks out of the shadows looking every inch an extremely pissed off cat, shoulders tense and high, soaking wet and pale, lips a straight line. Clint can’t exactly blame her; when they’d been separated he’d known pretty much from the on-set that he’d gotten the better end of the deal. 

To emphasize his point - because he’s feeling cheeky, and also, yeah, they’re technically on the lamb (he loves that expression,  _on the lamb_ , seriously who comes up with this shit) - he taps the accelerator of the car, and can’t help shivering a little when it purrs beneath him.

Clint can appreciate the slight irony of insisting on bow fighting while also being something of a motorhead; it’s not like he doesn’t get reminded often enough. But he also never gets to drive something like  _this_.

"Where," Natasha grinds out, levering herself gingerly into the front seat. "Did you even find this. This. Is. Ridiculous."

"This is  _beauty_ , Natasha. You have to start enjoying the finer things,” He says, easing the Aston Martin back into the street and pointedly ignoring the glare she shoots him as she clicks into her seatbelt.

"You stole it," she says, eyes rolling impressively even as she pops open the glove box and starts to dig through it experimentally. She’s not disappointed, and comes up with a pair of expensive looking sunglasses, which she slides on even though it’s the middle of the night. Clint grins. 

"Obviously."

It’s an empty stretch of pavement and he can climb through the gears quickly - the car upshifts effortlessly, eating great swaths of newly lain asphalt at a speed that is probably not acceptable, but hey it’s 2AM and he’s driving a car that feels like silk on the road, top down on a warm night, and a beautiful woman by his side…

"Hey.  _Hey!_  Stop dripping on my leather Nat,  _seriously_! Aw…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doses of Matt Fraction's Clint with a hearty dollop of MCU. Our favorite human disaster.


	6. Falling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chiralities universe.

**Falling**

*

The story goes like this: she fell, you fell. She fell again.

You were there for the first, missed the second.

Can’t quite forgive yourself for either.

She’s always slipping out of your grasp, and your fingers (literally or physically) can’t keep her safe.

You had hands then, real flesh and bone, with long fingers that play the piano, palm with the scar where you cut yourself on a kitchen knife slicing an apple, pale and slender until blood rises on them and they turn red red red, red from cold and red with hot blood under your nails.

Hands.

You are steel now, cold metal with the strength of iron at your side. You pause, think, watch the plates on your fingers shiver and shift, calibrate around the movement, nearly silent except for the electric shudder that runs up the base of your neck.

So you are not weak, not any more.

She isn’t either, and you realize it just a touch too late. Has two hands, like yours.

(Used to be.)

Two hands that throw a shield, throw a punch, still gentle somehow, even when you feel ten fingers close over your shoulder, falling out of socket.

Weak hands. Strong heart.

It’s what you’re missing, you think, the limb that aches in its absence. Someone always forgets that part.

You let her fall again.

Once, twice, three times now. Falling because she believed in you, and you don’t even know your own name, but you have been here before: one, two, three.

You’ve been falling for 70 years without stopping.

Once more won’t hurt.


	7. Girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve Rogers can't talk to women. (Trope installment: check)

**Girls**

*

He’s not very good at this, which Peggy makes abundantly clear.

That evening when he comes back to the barracks and recounts the story of the shield, and vibranium, and yes _, it’s really very effective, I’m not kidding Bucky, they fell right at my feet_ …

Anyway, it’s the first time he’s heard Bucky laugh in weeks, maybe the first real smile he’s seen since he was hovering over him in the middle of a smoky room, metal in his mouth, and the tang of something supernatural all around them. He’ll take it, even if it does come at his own expense.

“So you’re telling me,” Bucky snorts, leaning back on his cot and fiddling with the chain around his neck, “that she just came up and kissed you? Just like that?”

“Just like that!” Steve’s still at a loss on the blonde (Private Lorraine?), but he can still sort of feel where her hands rested on his shoulders, and what her hips had felt like for the brief moment he’d touched them. “She said I was a hero. And then she was just…on. On my face.”

“You’re ridiculous.” Bucky rolls his eyes and shifts down a little, closing his eyes. He looks rumpled and slightly unkempt, but this _is_ the barracks, Steve reasons, and if a man can’t lay around with his shirt untucked in what is his best approximation of his bedroom, where can he?

“Anyway,” he continues, “Peggy came around the corner then and that’s that, and I may have insinuated something about her relationship with Howard.”

Bucky makes a noise that’s somewhere between a giggle and a groan. “Good luck with that Steve,” he says, voice muffled under his pillow.

"Does she _have_ a relationship with Howard?"

"...no."

Steve lets out a long breath. 


	8. Health

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a Tumblr friend, who asked "What if Bucky broke his foot, and Steve built him a blanket fort?"

**Health**

*

"We’ll put cushions on the floor! Just like when we were kids!" Steve says, already moving enthusiastically into their living room, and tossing a few stray odds and ends onto the coffee table. "I mean, these…okay, so these don’t come off. Wait…"

Bucky waits. Scrubs his face with one hand and sighs.

"Don’t you think we may be a little old for this?" He asks, leaning over the back of one of their armchairs for a better view of the couch Steve is trying to disassemble.  "Also, I’m supposed to be putting it  _up_ ,” and he gestures to his left foot, strapped carefully in a walking cast. “Not…down.”

"No, no; it’ll be great. Just gimme a second."

"It’s the  _floor_ , Steve. It’s  _down._ ”

Steve pauses and looks up at him, hair mussed and falling into his eyes. He swipes at it distractedly, then fixes Bucky with a Look, the effectiveness of which is not at all tarnished by the fact that he’s on his knees in stocking feet and clutching a purple throw pillow.

"It’s not  _dignified_ ,” Bucky tries, knowing full well that he’s on the tail end of a losing argument, but not quite willing to admit it. Steve just snorts.

"You hurt yourself by falling down the stairs trying to catch the pizza delivery boy, Buck. I think you’ve pretty well passed dignified."

"I hate you," he says, and slides (as gracefully as possible with one foot in a walking boot, which, as it turns out, is not very) down to the carpeted floor, leans his back against the front of the couch and lets his legs stretch out in front of him.

"No you don’t," Steve says cheerfully, and drops a blanket over the top of Bucky’s head. "Don’t move. I’m going to bring in the kitchen chairs."


	9. invictus maneo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winter Solider POV.

**invictus maneo**

*

I

I am

_not, I am NOT, no_

I feel I think I

wonderwhereIam

wheream _I_

doesn’t matter.

I

(I am here can’tyouseeme)

If you just _looked -_

I am NOT

not going backthere _never_

(I don’t know why)

_I do._

I _know_ you.

I know your face, but

(notmyown, _I am_ )

serial, sergeant 32-557-891

letmeout letme _see_

_I see you_

WHO

_Who am I?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> invictus maneo = 'I remain unvanquished'


	10. Jane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frozen Bananas (Elsa/Jane Porter)

**Jane**  

*

It’s hard to be away, sometimes.

She doesn’t want to feel it – pushes it down, buries underneath smiles and books and research, under long walks and the warmth of Elsa’s hand in hers and Anna’s laughing smiles, but it comes up, up, up, like she’s trying to hold a bar of soap under water, and it keeps slipping through her fingers and shooting through the surface.

There isn’t anything for it; after all, she chose this: Arendelle, with its sprawling green fjords and glittering waters, the crest of new snow unbroken on the steepled rooftops, and its summertime tulips and ribbons fluttering from windowsills and in the braids of small children.

She chose it, she loves it, she does –

It’s just.

It’s not always home.

She chuckles wetly to herself over a cup of terrible tea, gone cold in her cup, and wipes distractedly at her cheeks. Bless Elsa, but she still hasn’t wet got the hang of brewing a proper cup – always leaves the strainer in too long, and lets the tannins bitter, or takes it out too soon and leaves the pot watery and weak. She sips at it anyway, because tasteless or not, it’s something to do while she collects herself a little.

It’s getting late in her office – cool air is seeping through the stones and the little cracks in the cheerfully painted wood, the sinking sun bathing the upper third of the opposite wall a golden orange, the rest fading slowly into grey. She sits for a moment, not sure what thought it was that drove her out of her reading, and lets her eyes fall absently on the sheaves of paper scattered around her, on the smudges of ink on her fingers, the dainty china roses painted on the porcelain saucer and their green leaves.

It’s ridiculous, she thinks, sitting hard against the back of her chair. Silly thoughts for a silly girl, to be homesick in your own house.

Silly to miss the acrid scent of coal in the air of London, the chatter of the city, the dirt and the smell and the humanity of it, pressing in close and tight. She’d sworn to find and relish the protected places, the lush and green, the fresh and clear; and she’d found them, again and again, in the rainforests of Africa, the deserts, dry and long, Arendelle and the sweep of her mountains with its citadels of ice.

Shaking her head, she stands and begins to stack together her papers briskly, shuffling them into neat piles, tossing back the test of the tea, pushing in her chair. The chill in the room is creeping closer, crawling in under her layers of skirts from the empty fireplace; the day is drawing to its end.

Jane flaps at her skirts to flatten them, adjusts her sleeves, and gives a final glance over her shoulder at the  skinny grey room, and the single patch of brilliant sunset lit above the fireplace.

It’s time, she thinks, to shut the door on home for today. 


	11. Kiss Me Once

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fits in the modern AU verse of 'Courage to the Sticking Place' and 'Date Material; features Elsa and Jane Porter

**Kiss Me Once**

_*_

_Kiss me once, then kiss me twice -_

"Elsa."

_Then kiss me once again_

"ELSA."

Elsa jerks up from where she’s bent half way over the kitchen counter, peering nearsightedly at the cookbook she has propped against the toaster. The pages are stained from years of buttery fingers flipping through to the correct pages, from trailing down the side of ingredients lists and across the lines of directions reading “crimp crust firmly between the thumb and forefinger, creating a pleasing frilled edge” which in Elsa’s opinion, is a little but purple for a cookbook, but what does she know.

The spine is filled with traces of granulated sugar, the pages slightly dusty with flour, and this close, the whole thing smells a little bit like an old, stale cookie. It’s not a bad smell – just, she figures, what a recipe book  _should_  smell like, if it were fifty years old and well used. It’s as good an indication that the food is worth eating as the fact that the spine is split in several places so that it wants to fall open to a version of turkey pot pie, gingersnap cookies, and Thanksgiving potatoes, whatever those are.

“Elsa, can you hear me at all?” Jane’s voice is amused over the sound of the radio, and Elsa can hear more than see that her hands are on her hips, palms backward in that odd way she has. She looks up, blinks, and yes: Jane is hovering near the mock doorway to their kitchenette, leaning slightly to her left, which is weighed down with a leather saddlebag purse and probably several pounds of books.

In the background, Kitty Kallen slides into the refrain.

_It’s been a long, long, time -_

“Yes,” she says belatedly, and brushes her hands together, sending up a cloud of flour. Jane smiles, then sneezes. “Sorry…”

“What are you doing in here?”

“Um,” Elsa says, and gestures behind her. “Well. So.” It’s a bit of a mess.

Jane rolls her eyes fondly. “Forget I asked,” she says, before dropping her bag and stepping through the mock threshold onto the tile floor. “Although it still boggles my mind a little, that someone who actually owns a restaurant can be so terribly bad at baking.”

“I’m not terrible,” Elsa grumbles, but she lets Jane snake her arms around her waist and nuzzle her (cold) nose into the crook of her neck anyway. “Ice cream is different, and anyway, I’ve seen you cook in here. There’s no room for anything. And,” she adds, plucking at the back of Jane’s yellow wool coat, “You’re going to get covered in flour.”

“Mrphm.” Jane replies, snuggling in closer. “ You’re warm. ‘s cold out there.”

_Haven’t felt like this my dear_

_Since I can’t remember when_

“Yes, well.” Elsa sighs, happily resigned to being aggressively cuddled, and lets her cheek fall against the top of Jane’s head. She smells a bit like the library, of dust and cooks and very old central heating, slightly electric on top of wood and worn carpet, and the lingering traces of her perfume.

Unconsciously they begin to sway, rocking gently to the soft wail of the trumpet coming from the living room stereo.

“Yes,” Elsa repeats. “You know it’s always warm in here.”

Jane nods and murmurs happily, a smile ghosting like a kiss along the side of Elsa’s neck, her fingers briefly tightening where they rest on her hips. Outside the wind is brisk and cold, night darkening the sky autumn early, porch lights flickering on and cars pulling into driveways, but inside is cozy and heart-warm, a big band on the radio and the sweet, rising scent of old-fashioned molasses drop cookies.

_It’s been a long, long, time._


	12. Lightning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another Tumblr prompt: Bucky doesn't like lightning. (for obvious reasons)

**Lightning**

*

Bucky has met Thor. In fact, they’ve always given the appearance of getting along rather well - Thor is often contemplative and quiet (Jane is capable of out-talking nearly everyone, Tony excepted) and Bucky doesn’t talk much at all, but they will frequently sit out on the landing deck together, Bucky clutching a mug of coffee, Thor with his face tilted to the sun. 

They’ve both  _been_  and  _seen_  - moreso, in some ways, than the others, with their everyday horrors to haunt them. Because Thor has the appearance of being in his mid-thirties, it’s easy to forget that he’s older than the rest of them not by decades, but by  _millennia_.

Bucky has lived millennia inside a hundred years, so.

It makes sense, in it’s odd way: Thor, god of strength, solid green oaks and healing, trailed occasionally by a man who is sometimes more ghostly than corporeal, gliding along like a shadow. Steve isn’t always the best for this, he knows; he often tries too hard, talks to much. Solid, strong and stable is not their definition these days. It’s more like limping along and hoping to god he’s not making things worse. 

Having the others around helps. Thor particularly, perhaps because he has always had room by his side for someone dark and sleek.

Still.

They probably should have seen it coming, because while Thor is so often calm and thoughtful, he _is_  the god of lightning and thunder.

And thunder  _roars_.

To see him go from sipping tea at the kitchen table in civvies to Asgardian Prince is always a little startling; it’s a bit like getting smacked in the face, when Thor switches, as Clint puts it, “to full-on Warrior God mode,  _I mean goddamn.”_

When he erupts into full battle dress, it is accompanied by curls of lightning that scatter around his body and cloak, the sides and angles of Mjolnir and crackle between his fingers. 

Bucky goes white and the glass in his hand shatters, leaving crumbles of clear shards on the floor like hailstones.

Some days it’s two steps forward, one step back. But, Steve reasons, sweeping up the glass and keeping one eye on Bucky, who has fled back out to the landing deck, hunched shoulders just visible through the wide tinted windows - it’s still a day. 

It’s still a day, and Bucky has his eyes on the sky.


	13. Modern Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "you see her sitting with her coffee and her paper / with her high top sneakers of Italian design" - Billy Joel, Modern Woman

*

The day that Tony Stark walks into her coffee shop (walks, waltzes, whatever, the man APPEARS) Darcy Lewis almost inhales coffee up her nose and definitely drops half of her muffin on the floor.

Okay, so it’s not HER coffee shop, but it’s where she sits most mornings, nursing a large cafe latte (soy, natch) and reading the newspaper - on her tablet, because she is a cultured human being with an appreciation for features like ‘swipe to continue’ but also likes to be caught up on current events, particularly when current events started being things like aliens dropping out of the sky and Norse gods in New Mexico.

It’s what any smart person would do, and Darcy’s daddy didn’t raise no fools. Still, she’s been in New York with Jane and Thor (Erik periodically too - he has a habit of showing up on their couch in the middle of the night, half covered with scribbled notes and a burned out computer besides, but he’s been away for a little while now, which tends to tone down the science).

Anyway, between Jane and Thor there is still plenty of physics talk, but it’s all in metaphor and Darcy is a smart cookie (if she does say so herself) but they are waaaay out of her league by about 9AM most days, thus cafe latte. And paper.

And now, apparently, Tony Stark.

Stark Tower isn’t all the far away, but according to Jane, who is only IN New York solely for the purpose of consulting with him and his science buddies anyway…Stark is the kind of man to brew his own coffee, not walk 6 blocks (and, being that this is New York, past about a dozen coffee joints on the way) to a Starbucks that, to be honest, Darcy has really only come back to because of the cute barista.

As she wheezes through the sudden inhalation of her drink, Darcy can’t help but be a little surprised at herself for being star-struck. But, to be fair, she’s in political science and industry. Science-science may not be her thing exactly, but people are, important, world changing people definitely are, and Tony Stark was pretty close to the top of her list of bucket list people to meet BEFORE the whole kidnapped in Afghanistan, flying suit of armor bit.

Plus, she’d been about 17 then. Teenage idols get a pass.

This thought is calming for the 30 seconds or so it takes her to catch her breath, dust the muffin crumbs off her shirt and try to go back to looking inconspicuous.

She sneaks a glance up in the direction of the cash registers and squeaks because now Tony Stark is two feet from her chair and looking down at her with a resigned look on his face.

"You’re Darcy Lewis?" He asks, eyes darting at her briefly, then up, over her head and out the large front windows. She can see the weave on his suit. He wears Adidas sneakers that are new and white, but with old laces just peeking out from the hem of his trousers. This she knows because she is staring in the general direction of his feet, which is to say, at the floor.

Darcy Lewis’s daddy didn’t raise no fools, no sir, and he didn’t raise his girls to be timid either, so Darcy raises her head, flicks her eyes up to Tony Stark, and slaps on a smile.

"That’s me," she says, and tips the lipstick stained rim of her disposable coffee mug at him.

"Good," he says briskly. "Jane Foster said you’d be here, although WHY, I can’t imagine -" he trails off for a second, then, "Come on, you are SLOW, also, your taste in coffee is terrible." He circles his wrists rapidly in the universal gesture for ‘hurry your ass up’ still looking out the window, and jerks his head toward the exit.

Bemused, Darcy stands, and follows him out of the building, leaving her half-drunk (and admittedly fairly awful) latte on the table


	14. Nobody Dances Sober

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Avengers Gen - Halloween edition.

Tony throws a mean Halloween party. There’s just no getting around that fact, despite the fact that she would very much like to begrudge him the point; Natasha likes to be right, and she’d put $50 down on Cap not showing up at all, much less in costume.

"I want to know where he bought that thing," Clint hisses into her ear. They’re hovering around the hors devours table in the tradition of all party lurkers, picking at the trays of bacon wrapped shrimp and little spears of cheese and olives. Natasha is both glad and slightly disappointed that the food is not necessarily Halloween themed - after a week of the Avengers binging non-stop theme movies on the Disney channel, she had come to the conclusion that an American Halloween party must include food mutilated to resemble body parts.

This might be her first Halloween without a job; the last several years with SHIELD had all fallen on missions of some kind or another - chasing down monsters of an all to real nature. It’s against her instincts to presume that this night will go off without a hitch, but then, there’s really no reason to expect trouble, save for the fact that Tony is a loudmouth and the booze is flowing freely.

She pops another shrimp in her mouth and wipes her fingers delicately on a purple napkin, then yanks at the hem of her skirt. It’s a little shorter than she’d normally choose for herself, and tight enough that it’d be hard to run in - on the plus side, the vest has lots of useful pockets and the belt is wide enough to tuck her essentials in. Two knives, a garrote, a little packet of flash powder and a tube of mint chapstick.

On the plus side though, her hat is sort of fun. She reaches up with on hand to check its placement over her hair, and, once satisfied with the jaunty angle, turns to look Clint in the face.

"You know," she muses, giving him a once over, "I had my doubts, but the Centurion look is kind of working on you."

"Of course it is," Clint says dismissively, waving a hand at her. He has one of the little skewers of olives pinched between his forefinger and thumb; a pimento quivers at the end of the wood, barely clinging on as he gestures grandly at the gold breastplate and red ruff. "I am magnificent. Anyway," he continues, ignoring Natasha’s snort, "I still did NOT see that coming. Goddamn. D’you think he’d get embarrassed if I whistled?”

Natasha glances over in the direction Clint is gesturing toward with his olive stick and sighs.

Across the large room nearer the little stage where the band is busy getting into the swing of an adaptation of Mack the Knife, Steve is dancing - actually dancing, albeit with a haphazardness that betrays that he really has no idea what he’s doing - with Pepper in a sort of clumsy two step, with arms flinging a little wide and footwork a little loose. Pepper’s head is thrown back laughing, her ruby slippers sliding across the hardwood floor as Steve directs her through the movements.

The two of them have attracted something of an audience around the stage: Tony, face painted silver, taking pictures on his phone; Thor and Jane, draped in togas clearly constructed from Jane’s paisley printed bedsheets; Bruce, looking quietly amused in bare feet and overalls. On their other side, Coulson is staring, wide eyed and open mouthed - he is dressed in his usual suit, but has thoughtfully included a sticker with the letters ‘MIB’ over the breast pocket.

Bucky, as a departure from his usual state of glowering silence, is doubled over on himself, literally slapping his knees in laughter, which Natasha was absolutely sure was just an expression until 5 minutes ago when Steve walked in the door.  
As she watches, Tony looks up from snapping pictures, and, catching her eye, rubs his fingers together in her direction, smile wide and utterly delighted. Natasha groans.

"I think the real lesson here is - don’t bet against Steve," she sighs, patting down her police vest for where she’s stashed her cash.

Clint nods sympathetically, now chewing on the olive skewer. “I would have taken that one,” he says around the little stick of wood. “And I’d still want to know where you can even buy those - hey, I’m just curious!” He says when she arches an eyebrow at him. “A vintage women’s USO costume? In his size? Come on, Natasha. That couldn’t have been easy.”

"Worth the $50 though, I think," Natasha says, grinning now as Steve leans Pepper over in an impressive dip. Their audience claps and the music from the band swells, and they’re off again in what looks like a foxtrot, Steve’s ruffled skirt fluttering above his fishnet stockings.

"Oh definitely," Clint says. "Hey, so, pass the shrimp?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Costumes! Bruce is Johnny Appleseed, Pepper is Dorothy and Tony is the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, Coulson is Agent K, Thor and Jane are Zeus and Aphrodite, Natasha and Clint are Amy Pond and Rory Williams in the Kiss-o-Gram and Centurion get up, and Steve is a USO girl.
> 
> Bucky refused point blank to dress up. There's always next year.
> 
> (the title is from a latin phrase: nobody dances sober unless he is completely insane)


	15. Okay, We're Alright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Same universe as Courage to the Sticking Place.

**Okay, We're Alright**

*

Kristoff asks Anna to marry him on a Sunday night in March, when they’re sitting around her rickety dining table eating slightly freezer-burnt moose tracks ice cream out of the carton because all of the bowls are dirty, piled high in the sink. Their knees bump occasionally under the cheap particle board, invisible because of Anna’s cheerful tablecloth, stocking feet stacked lazily together in the middle. It’s still cold outside - spring hasn’t quite made it to New York - and the baseboard heating really isn’t working well enough for ice cream, but Anna had opened the fridge, grimaced, opened the freezer, grimaced again, and finally pulled the old and bent carton out from behind a few sacks of frozen corn.

"Elsa would be appalled," she’d joked, forgoing the ice cream scoop for slightly misshapen spoons, and dropped the whole thing as a sticky mess right on the green paisley patterned cotton. "Dinner’s up!"

"You only have this because you’ve been too busy actually  _eating_  Elsa’s ice cream,” he’d said, but reached for the carton anyway. “Hers never lasts more than a day or two.”

"It’s this or week old stir-fry; Weselton’s is closed," she said, citing Arendelle’s lonely pizza parlor (greasy, slightly overpriced, not open after 8PM and still somehow insanely popular with the hoards of local college students) before dropping into the seat opposite.

"I’ll take my chances with the ice cream."

Anna grinned at him around her spoon, and kicked him gently under the table, and so they dug in like little kids, chasing each other’s spoons away from the best bits, each trying to get the most fudge.

About half way through, when they’re just a little bit chilled and sugary, and Anna is drawing circles in the melted river of chocolate and peanut butter on the lid, Kristoff realizes suddenly, with the steady, assured conviction of a man who knows - who  _knows_  - that he could eat grainy old ice cream forever, if it were with her, if it were like this, cold and sticky and way too late, if he could see her smile and watch her draw snowmen with a teaspoon, if it were Anna, only her.

He sits up a little straighter in his chair, and swallows hard.

"So I think we should get married," Kristoff says.

Anna drops her spoon on the floor.

For a few long minutes they stare at each other, eyes held under the yellowing florescent light, amidst the dirty pots and pans and bowls in the sink, the cheap linoleum flooring, the shaggy green rug that Anna had liberated from a thrift store, the one Kristoff thinks looks like a skinned Muppet, the one she thinks looks like spring grass to dig her toes into, and the old-style advertisements for European castle vacations, ripped out of magazines and carefully framed and hung on the bare walls.

Anna says, “Oh,” and licks her lips.

Kristoff says, “Um,” and tries to think, can’t think, can’t  _move_ , can’t barely breathe, sitting in the too small chair in the too small kitchen, watching Anna lean down to pick up the spoon.

After another long inhale, she stands, pushes in her chair and stalls, absently reaching for one of her braids. She fiddles with it when she’s nervous, Kristoff knows. He knows it’s always the one on the right, the one with the silver blonde streak. He knows exactly how she’ll wind it between her fingers, fluff the free end under her chin as she thinks.

He knows she loves chocolate in all forms except for KitKats, which she inexplicably hates. He knows that the scar on her chin is from falling out of an apple tree when she was very little, and that cheap detergent will make her break out in hives, he knows why she still walks with a little bit of a limp when she’s tired, when exactly it was that she broke her ankle skateboarding down the hall of her apartment complex in the middle of the night, and he knows that their first kiss was in a parking lot at 2 in the morning, and that’s how he knows that she can eat her weight in maple pancakes. He knows she wears her mother’s wedding ring on her right hand, and that her sister Elsa wears their father’s on a necklace, that Elsa is her favorite person on the planet probably, but that they’re complicated in the way sisters can be sometimes, learning how to love each other close instead of at a distance.

"I know," Kristoff, scrambling, "I know that it’s kind of soon, and I, I mean. Um."

Anna just gives him a funny look, chewing on her lips, one hand not quite resting, hovering hear the table, like she wants to lean on it but isn’t sure.

"I don’t want to be like him," he says finally, gently. "You can say no, if you want. Obviously."

"I never thought you were," she says pointedly. "I’m just. Well. Okay, so I’m a  _little_  surprised, yeah, but Elsa warned me, and - “

"Wait, Elsa  _warned_  - “

"She said I should expect it, because big sisters  _see_ , and I didn’t even know what she thinks she even  _means_  by that, but. Here we are.”

"Yes," Kristoff mutters into his hands. "Here we are. Look, Anna, I’m sorry, just forget - "

"I never said no," she interrupts, and puts one hand on his shoulder. It’s warm, grounding as ever, a comfort even when he feels like crawling under the table. "I don’t think you’re anyone but Kristoff, and I was just - a little surprised, I think - but, I haven’t said no."

"What are you saying then?" He asks, and his heart is beating staccato in his chest. His grandfather liked to tell a story about the day he met his grandmother, and the yellow sweater she wore, and how he’d seen her working the till at a little shop in their town that sold lamps, and how she’d looked up and smiled like the sun, like an actual ray of sunshine on a grey afternoon.

"Someday, someday, Kristoff," he’d said, "someday some woman is going to set your heart on fire like that, light up your whole life. You’ll know it."

Kristoff remembers the smile on his face, the wry twist of his lips, the  _knowing_. “Will I now,” he said, cynical and sarcastic and seventeen, shuffling a deck of playing cards and dealing them a hand of Rummy.

"You will," he replied. "Don’t shuffle like a troll; let me show you."

Kristoff looks at Anna and he sees the sun.

He sees at her with oversized glasses, studying; he sees her rifling through donation boxes at the local thrift shop; he sees her complaining about the cold and wriggling in excitement over the season’s first snow; sees her pacing the hallway with her phone wedged under her chin listening to Elsa talk; he sees her eating ice cream for dinner, and teasing him for aggressively scooping out the lumps of peanut butter.

He looks at her now, and he sees her shining, radiant and shy, glowing pink in her cheeks.

"I think I’m saying - I  _know_ -” she pauses, and suddenly smiles full, wide and bright, “that I’m saying  _yes_.”


	16. Patriot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written partially for the US midterm elections, may we and our civil liberties all rest in peace.

**Patriot**

*

Steve Rogers turns 18 on July 4th, 1936.

It’s summer and it’s New York so it’s hot as hell and sticky to boot, but on Monday July 6th, he takes the afternoon off of work and marches down to the county clerk. By the time he gets there his hair is slick in the back and his undershirt is clinging to his chest, but it’s worth the walk, he thinks, because it’s an election year.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is on the ballot, along with a fellow called Alf Landon.

Steve doesn’t know much about the candidate from Kansas - just the posters with his slogan he sees sometimes before they’re plastered over with new ads for this or that band or nightclub act; this is Red Hook, and politics aren’t on the brain as much as the ability to buy cold beer for cheap.

He can’t blame them, not really, but the President’s New Deal is what puts food on his and Bucky’s table most nights, and industry and jobs that support them both, so he figures FDR is a pretty okay sort of politician, doing his best for people like he can.

Anyway. Bucky likes to tease him, says he thinks to much for a Brooklyn boy drawing comics for a living, but Steve has also seen him pour over the paper when he thinks Steve’s not looking, tracing the election news, reading the stocks.

_You ain’t never going to own stock, Buck_ , he’d tease back. _We’re just Brooklyn boys, like you say._

The man sitting at the desk looks at him over the top of his glasses and sighs when Steve slides his registration card across the table.

"You gotta be 18 to register kid," he says, with the tired voice of someone who would vastly prefer to not be in a stuffy back office, filing paperwork for the government.

"I am," says Steve, and pulls the ratty copy of his birth certificate out of his wallet. "Turned 18 on Saturday."

The man gives him another skeptical look, but takes the paper when Steve offers it. He turns his back for a minute, shuffling in the cupboards behind him on the wall, scribbles down Steve’s information and finally pulls out a stiff little card. He stamps it with a red rubber mallet and slides it over the worn wood.

"Don’t lose that," he warns when Steve picks it up, cradles it gently in his palm so not to get fingerprints along the face of it, where his name is printed neatly next to the bold black stenotype letters spelling out his district and state. "If you move outta district or outta state you gotta get it updated wherever you’re at."

"I understand." He slips the card in the wallet, slides his thumb along of the crisp stock paper and the soft boxed edges of his birth certificate before shoving the whole thing back into his pocket. "Well sir, thanks."

"You bet kid," the man mutters, head already bowed over another piece of paper.

On November 4th, 1936, Steve Rogers stands in a long line outside a local church and shivers in the cold air, Bucky crowded up against his back, grumbling about the weather.

"There’s gotta be a better way to do this," Bucky grouses as they walk home, hands shoved deep into their pockets and heads hunched against the slight headwind.

"Nah," Steve says, thinking about the little velvet rope and booth and how it felt dropping his ballot into the collection box, the soft sound it had made, paper on paper. He thinks about the New Deal and about Red Hook and Depression and about the murmurs on the street corners, and the numbers of new people he sees every day, huddled together with wide eyes, tongues moving fast around sounds he does not know, about Europe and America and the world.

"Nah Buck, I think this is just about right."


	17. Quilted

**Quilted**

*

One of the possessions - actual person items, not palace things, accumulated over centuries of Arendellian monarchs and dignitaries, but real personal possessions - that Anna’s mother left her daughters was a carpet bag full of fabric.

It sat, with most of their remaining possessions, untouched in the dusty corners of the castle, too heavy with memories and ghosts to be stored, or even lifted. The months immediately after the accident both Anna and Elsa had been too distraught over the sheer enormity of the loss to have a thought for mere things. By the time enough time had passed that Anna could look at flowers again and smile, or remember the way her father’s mustache had quivered when he laughed without needing to excuse herself to cry (privately, always, somewhere dark and safe and alone), the suite of rooms that had belonged to her parents was another closed door, too imposing to open.

A combination of winter restlessness and fortitude buoyed by the presence of Elsa and Kristoff, met Anna pushing past the threshold on a cloudy afternoon in late January, armed with a bucket of soapy water and a rag, determined, at the very least, to properly dust, to air the room into a fond memory instead of a tomb.

She finds the the carpet bag under their large four poster bed, wedged between the headboard and the wall, squished out of shape and heavy.

"What did you find?" Kristoff asks from somewhere over her head. "You got awfully quiet down there."

Anna wriggles back out from where she’d been half buried under the bed herself, dragging the bag with her, and heaves the whole thing up onto the stripped mattress. Scraps and wool and muslin, cotton and satin spill out in a tattered rainbow over the bare sheet, little bits sewn together with Idunn’s tidy precise stitches, squares of various sizes, strips and blocks.

"Oh," she manages, half a whisper. "It’s a memory quilt."

~

It’s a memory alright - moreso than she can say, the scraps of fabric snipped neatly from her old dresses, her father’s suits. But it’s the memories within that she finds most striking, the way her mothers strong fingers would cover her tiny ones, helping her twist together the smooth wooden edges of the quilting frame, the metal screws digging into her palms. She remembers the hissing sound of water on a hot iron, the way her mother’s face would twist and wince before testing it with her fingertips, expecting pain every time while knowing perfectly well there wouldn’t be any, and the clattering sound of the hearth, stoked high for pressing and stretching fabrics. They had seamstresses and tailors for their clothes and every day items of course, but quilts were Idunn’s speciality.

Sitting in her room that evening, folding squares over her lap and smoothing the wrinkles, Anna wonders how she managed to forget this part of her, the calm, patient expression, the sight of a spare needle and thread tucked into her lapel, the soft shearing sound of scissors late in the evenings. Her father read the papers, her mother cut fabric: bright reds and green, blues the color of the sky and the ocean.

Anna can sew passably. She can put two pieces together, right sides facing, and baste them together in a (mostly) straight line. She can cut triangles against little templates of thin wood or paper, and she can still press a seam straight: quick, hot presses with the tiny irons fetched from the stove.

She knits better, and embroiders better than that - neither of the three particularly remarkable, but certainly useful. She’s never been one for sitting still long enough, the lure of other distractions always too great.

Still, she thinks, now laying out the pieces out on her own quilted bedspread, there’s a worthiness there. Quilting requires patience yes, but also an eye for how the pieces fit, how the shapes work together with the colors. You have to be so careful, so deliberate, each piece representing thought and consideration and time.

It’s different than string work. People like to say things are ‘knit together’ as a metaphor for strength, and there’s truth in that - you can snap a single woolen thread with ease, but a swatch of knit fabric? Not so easy. The thing is though, when something is knit together it’s always meant to be - it’s an inevitability, a sure result of looping a single thread over itself a thousand, a hundred thousand times. You will always get to the end. A beautiful kind of creating, but very different.

So yes. She steps back and checks the colors together - deep blue wool and gold satin, deep purple velvet, cheerful spring greens against clean white muslins - it is a different thing to quilt, to choose.

"Anna?" Are you in here?" Kristoff’s head pokes through her cracked door, blonde hair falling into his eyes, and she looks up, and smiles.

It’s rather like choosing your family, or finding one again, making something new out of something spent.

She nods at Kristoff, lets the happy feeling wash over her again, and beckons him inside. Perhaps she can be a quilter like her mother after all.


	18. Rational Numbers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elsa.

There is a rule in mathematics that says, essentially, that if you take two numbers and write them as a fraction (p/q) and where ‘q’ is not equal to zero, the result is a ‘real number’, or a rational number. You take two whole things and divide them, and in the end you still have a rational expression, a number that is quantifiable, that exists in nature.

That’s the idea anyway.

Splitting two perfectly good whole things, and calling them real - in mathematics, it’s neat and tidy and everything equals out in the end, somewhere at the end of the ledger if you’ve done diligence in carrying your tens, ticking items off on your fingertips.

In real life, you take two whole things and split them against each other, all you have is a fraction. Something that isn’t whole anymore.

Her books say it was Pythagoras who coined the term, that he believed all numbers were rational.

His student Hippasus proved him wrong.

You can’t divide by zero.

The square root of two doesn’t exist.

The books say he was cast into the sea, which is kind of ironic, because he was talking about irrational numbers, and that’s a pretty irrational action if she does say so herself.

Elsa appreciates the Greek myths, and math. They’re about as different as two studies can be, all temptation and seduction, passion, grief, honor. Failure. Redemption. Contrast to the cool simplicity of numbers. Two plus two equals four. Sin, cosine, tangent. Formulas where all you need to do is set the numbers into place, and let the expressions tumble together into a single solution.

They’re born of the same place, and she appreciates that too. Greeks. (Someday maybe she’ll visit. She hears it’s warm.)

She idly traces the grpahite figures on paper, flips the beads on her abacus. She’s had this one since she was very young, and the wooden beads are marked with ink and pencil dust and years of being touched.

Elsa wonders what that would be like too, sometimes. Wooden chairs, wool clothes. They do not companions make.

There’s a sound outside her study door - a shuffling of feet and muttering, a shadow near the doorway, then Gerda’s voice. It fades as quickly as it comes, but it still takes too long to relax again. She grips her pencil so tightly her fingers ache and tremble.

You can’t divide by zero.

There’s no such thing as the square root of two.

It’s irrational.


	19. Skyfall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chiralities 'verse

**Skyfall**

_Let the sky fall_  
 _When it crumbles_  
 _We will stand tall  
Face it all together_

*

Kristoff is seven years old when someone on the playground calls the challenge: “Race you to the top!”

That’s the beginning then, the start of it, this love affair with the sky.

He remembers it clearly - short legs scrambling up the faded red plastic slide, how the iron of the monkey bars was cold and smooth under her hands, how he could perch above everything, oversee the whole of the park from the barkchips below to the parking lot, the waterfountains and swing sets. It’s no contest, but out of the corner of his eye he sees a younger kid fall and bust his face on the seesaw, and it’s no thought - nothing of the height, nothing of the promise of the ground below (maybe he believed he wasn’t falling if he lept, or maybe he was just seven years old and stupid) - no thought at all to fling himself off the apex of the castle-like playstructure to go and help.

"Explain this to me again," his mother asks later, when he’s back at home and she is carefully pressing a cold bag of frozen peas to his bruised knees. "You jumped 15 feet down off of the monkey bars to help someone with a skinned knee?"

"Nose," he corrects, and earnes a Look. "But ma, he was hurt."

"Was there no one else to help him? An adult?"

"Maybe, but I saw him first."

His mother hums a little, expression softening. “You’re a good boy, Kristoff.” She smacks a kiss to the top of his head, and steps back to look him in the eye. “Very good. Just don’t forget to look before you leap. Sometimes we land a little harder than this.”

She’s right of course. Mothers usually are.

~

Kristoff is 20 years old when the Towers come down in New York.

He sits clustered with his siblings in his parent’s living room, swallowed by their ancient green couch, and watches his mother pacing in the hall way, wringing her hands around the string of crystal beads she’s worn since he was little, whispering to his father.

One of the little one climbs into his lap and tugs at his hair, and he wonders what kind of world she’ll grow up in. His younger brother is watching the TV with wide eyes, 13 and still young enough to be shocked at how cruel people can be, his other sister standing on the far side of the room.

"What are you doing," he asks, when she pulls back the drapes for the fifth time in as many minutes.

"I’m looking for planes," she says, and she’s so matter of a fact that it makes him want to cry.

The next day he leaves work early and heads to a recruitment office.

Air Force.

He wants to help, that’s all.

~

Kristoff is 24 years old.

He is a member of the 58th pararescue.

He knows where to apply pressure to a bleeding wound, how to splint a broken bone, to keep a patient stable when they are concussed, unconscious, hurt and scared.

They give him wings, and he can fly.

On the first morning of special ops training, he sits in a meeting with a shorter man with shaggy brown hair who spends the whole time fiddling with his flight suit, adjusting and re-adjusting his goggles in his hands, pressing them to his eyes and squinting experimentally.

At the end of the briefing, a man with more medals on his chest than Kristoff has ever seen pulls them both into the corridor.

"Kristoff Bjorgman, Sven Rangifer. Get to know each other."

Sven grins at him and thrusts a hand forward. He’s wearing red and purple braided bracelets; they are faded, soft and slightly frayed. Seeing him looking, Sven raises one wrist and points.

"They’re from my family. For protection, for safety."

Kristoff laughs, raises his right hand to show where his mother’s crystals are looped there, cool and smooth against his skin even in the warm stale air.

(The sky is the same as he has always remembered - cold, clear and perfect.)

~

Kristoff is 28 years old, and Sven is falling out of their diamond sky, a comet on fire, plunging toward the earth.

The flight suit feels heavy.

His mother’s crystals are uncomfortably warm, and so is the sky, choking him with dust and ash.

Sven’s locker is emptied practically before Kristoff can even process that he’s gone, instincts all screaming in his head _he needs that, don’t touch that, that’s HIS_ \- before memory catches up with him again.

Kristoff didn’t go to war to fight. He went to save, to help.

There doesn’t seem to be much worth saving anymore.

On his flight home, he keeps the window shade shut, stares at his hands for hours.

~

Kristoff is 33 years old, and a girl with long red braids is standing on his door step, looking beat and weathered and dirty, her companion silent and twitching a little, like she wants to dive into the dark safety of his house.

"I’m sorry," she says. "We didn’t have anywhere else to go."

He opens the door, looks up toward to the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I plucked Sven's last name from the formal species name for reindeer, which is 'Rangifer tarandus'.


	20. Transport

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha

Natasha  _hates_  the desert.

She’s just not a warm-weather sort of person. She likes pleasant weather well enough, doesn’t mind the California sun or how muggy Washington gets in the middle of summer, but the desert is hot, unrelentingly so.

It’s just not natural, she thinks, that it can be midnight anywhere and still be nearly 100 degrees. It’s like living inside an oven.

She’s escorting a nuclear engineer out of the country, and it is currently late evening: not late enough to be suspicious in their black sedan, not so early to draw any kind of attention. They’re anonymous on the road - or at least that’s the hope, surrounded by a mix of flashy vehicles owned by oil tycoons and the dusty, dented pickups of the locals.

Just another car. She counts backwards, ticking off the hours on her fingers; they’re on time. 15 hours to drop. 15 hours and she will be back on a plane with air conditioning, somewhere with water that doesn’t taste like mud, back in the quiet.

Natasha likes the quiet. It’s not very often that she gets the opportunity - there always seems to be someone whispering through a comm in her ear, or clinging to her arm muttering frightened gibberish, or the loud volley of gunfire, of rifles.

For a spy, she leads a rather noisy life.

She’s learned that the key is to be silent as often as possible. Be the insect on the wall. Be the spider that no one notices.

She’s good at it, and she’s practicing it right now - the engineer is afraid, and he’s the kind of afraid person that talks, as though by reciting his life’s story, poems from his childhood, mathematical formulas, that he will be safe through this.

He shouldn’t worry; he is under her protection, after all.

But she does rather wish he would be still. It’s a small car, stuffy, too hot. Sweat is rolling between her shoulder blade under her SHIELD issue uniform (“It breathes, it will be perfectly comfortable for a warm climate!” Someone told her this. She can’t remember. Junior agent, dirty blonde hair in a ponytail, large smile.)

The radio hums low under the rattle of the road, vocalist singing familiar songs in an unfamiliar language. She gets the gist. So many words are the same, from the same mother.

It’s  _hot._

Three things happen together: the driver of the car grumbles something angrily, reaches over and flips off the radio. The engineer stops muttering to himself, content for the moment with scribbling notes on a napkin he’s pulled from his breast pocket. They hit a smoother patch of road.

And it is quiet. Perfectly still, peaceful and quiet.

Fourth thing, between the fractions of seconds, the breath she takes in relief.

Single shot.

Everything erupts in noise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *carefully handwaves away the fact that technically the Odessa she refers to in TWS is in the Ukraine*


	21. Undead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vampire!Bucky AU. 
> 
> ...really.

**Undead**

*

His first thought upon regaining consciousness is how very, very dark it is.

The second, much less profound, is  _Fuck._

It's apt though, an occasion for swearing if he could think of one, waking up cold and being pressed on all sides by crumbling, drying dirt. He coughs, curses again when a hail of dust falls into his eyes and mouth, and crashes through a thin skin of earth, spitting and swearing, shaking himself more awake.

" _Fuck,_ " he says again, more eloquently this time. He's sitting in a fucking  _grave_ , somewhere in the middle of who the fuck knows where, a goddamn cornfield by the look of it.

"Yeah, it sucks," someone says from behind him, and he leaps up so fast he nearly trips over his boots and has to awkwardly wave his arms around to regain his balance.

When he's on his feet again, and not breathing quite so heavy,  _Jesus_ , he finds the source of the voice - a very tall shadow about ten feet away from his grave (he swallows hard at that, digs his fingernails into his palm) who is standing, arms crossed and feet wide, balanced firmly on the uneven ground.

"Who the fuck are you?" Bucky snarls. 

He doesn't like being taken by surprise, and this whole night has been one long surprise. Now that he's not immediately absorbed in the fact that he was underground, he can hear a rushing in his ears, the scurrying of creatures in the corn, the soft sounds of the other man's breathing. His skin crawls with it. 

Bucky shudders, stomps his feet. He should be cold. It's late. He should be tired. He wants to raise his face and scream into the stars until he doesn't have breath in his lungs.

"I'm Steve," the shadow says. He doesn't move any closer and doesn't offer any further explanation.

_He wants to rip his throat out._

The thought is so sudden and so immediately violent that Bucky chokes, pressing on his mouth with the back of his hand. His fingers are freezing, he realizes, though he doesn't really feel cold. (Something about his lips feels weird. He can't think about it, not now, not here.)

"Okay  _Steve_ ," Bucky drawls, willing for the moment to let bravado cover up the fact that he's truly pissed off and more than a little scared. "D'yah wanna tell me where we are? Because I was in _Brooklyn_ , champ, and this sure the hell ain't it." _  
_

"Nope," Steve The Shadow agrees. "You're in Indiana."

"Like  _hell_ _,"_ Bucky says, eyes wide. 

"No, not really at all." Steve The Shadow's voice sounds like he is trying very hard not to laugh. It's deep and low, but oddly friendly for a specter in the darkness, and Bucky is sort of weirdly glad he's not alone out here.

If he thinks too hard about this, he is going to freak the fuck out, and that is not going to help him get home.

Brooklyn. 

Wherever. 

Certainly not some bum-fuck cornfield in  _Indiana_. 

"Like I was saying, " Steve says, and he takes a step closer. "This most certainly does suck. For you, more than me. Um. In more ways than one probably, but we'll cover that later. How are you feeling?"

"How'm I  _feeling_." His voice comes out a lot higher than he meant it to, and he shivers again. Shudders, bone deep. 

"How," Steve repeats, "are you feeling? Be honest."

It takes him a few moments to pull his brain out of the mantra of  _oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck_ , another few to really consider. A tangible task. It's ridiculous, of course, he's here, he's breathing -

_He's not breathing -_

"What the _FUCK_?" He shouts, manually drawing air in, filling his lungs. He gets no relief, gasps, clutches at his chest and finally, fully begins to panic.

It’s his knees that hit the dirt first, then his hands, releasing their grip on his t-shirt just in time to stop him from doing a face-plant into the dirt, the debris of hay and stripped corn husks, dry cobs and spiders. Breathing is hard, too hard, like trying to fill an iron balloon - he gasps and claws at his chest, inhales, inhales, but it’s no use, he’s not getting any air, he’s going to suffocate in a cornfield in fucking Indiana.

“Don’t try - don’t think,” Steve’s voice says, much closer to his ear, and there’s a warm weight on his back between his shoulder blades. “You’re not dying.”

“Sure feels like it,” Bucky growls; it’s very hard, it turns out, to draw calming breaths, to steady oneself when you can’t breathe. Still, he concentrates on the other sensations: the hard press of his knees on the ground, the small circles Steve is rubbing on his back, the whisper of cold night on his cheeks.

“Trust me,” Steve says. “You definitely won’t. Can’t now, anyway.” Bucky turns to look at him then: he’s come to crouch next to him, long legs folded under his body. He's wearing what looks like dirty jeans, combat boots, a long sleeved black shirt.

He’s also got the bluest eyes Bucky has ever seen, and such a fair complexion that Bucky wondered how he managed to hide there so well anyway - he’s so white he’s practically glowing.

“Wait,” he says, getting back on track, mind replaying Steve’s last statement. “What do you mean, I ‘can’t now anyway’?”

“Oh,” Steve says, and he shifts his weight subtly, then, apparently changing his mind, stands and hauls Bucky to his feet with him. “I was actually hoping to put this off a little bit.”

“What do you mean,” Bucky says, narrowing in. Everything around him is starting to feel sharp again, but not so frightening now, the second time. Steve’s face is very, very clear, though he doesn’t look at all alarmed.

He should: Bucky knows how to appear menacing when he wants to, and settles into it comfortably. You don’t get too far living like he does without the ability to scare people just by lookin’. He’s not mean. It’s just how it is sometimes.

Even with Bucky glowering in his face, closing in his personal space, Steve doesn’t move. Just sort of shrugs, with a slight wince.

“Weeeell, it’s not so much a matter of you can’t die _anymore_ , more like...you already have.”

Bucky reels back, “ _What_?”

“Yeah,” Steve sighs, folding his arms resignedly. “You’re dead. Sorry about that.”

“Well, _fuck_.”

 

 


	22. Veins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> USO Steve.

**Veins**

*

Some things stayed the same.

The way the hair grows on his face, the little patch under his chin on the left side that is always resolutely patchy, the way parts of it appear to grow agains the grain. He still has the cowlick too, and is always waking up with absolutely atrocious bedhead.

He can hear Bucky laughing at him for that, staring at his reflection in the dirty little mirrors that are always present in the back of USO showrooms. The man looking back at him is tinged in the sepia hue of the glass, fractured by lines of silver across his forehead and cheeks.

His chin is bigger, square. Cheekbones a little shaper, but he's more or less used to that - the difference being that his cheeks aren't hollow underneath them. Instead he's rosy and robust, glowing with health.

It's one thing, Steve thinks, to have your body change. A man can grow. He can, in nature, get taller, become broader. Muscles grow. Boys become men.

Even in his little body he could mark the difference in the years - see in himself the drift from boyhood, the subtle shift of bone and muscle. He hadn't had much of course, hardly any at all really, but it was there subtly, and it had been enough.

In Bucky it was different and maybe Steve shouldn't be able to recount the changes - how he'd shot up several inches when they were 16, shuffling through the Rogers' kitchen while Sarah had let out the hem of his trousers for the third time, the way he would sling a narrow towel around his neck while he shaved, silly and vain about never leaving a scrap of stubble on his cheeks. (Steve could go days between shaves, sometimes longer, blond hair less noticable than Bucky's dark beard. He hated shaving. Still does.)

Either way, Bucky'd gone from wirely and slim to broad and built, tall and strong in what felt like no time at all - what had probably been several years, now that Steve's reckoning, but isn't that how it is with time? It goes so fast until you're counting it, then it's slower than anything, creeping along.

Steve looks down at where his hands are gripping the chipped porcelian sink.

Hands.

That had been something of a surprise - well, maybe not as much as he'd originally thought - his hands were the same, more or less the same size they'd always been. His whole life his hands were bigger than they ought to be for someone his size, long fingered with broad palms.

His mother would chuckle at him, call them artists hands, built for pencils and paints; perhaps she was right, because they never did have the opportunity to grow hard with thick skin like all the other young men's did, rough and scraped from unloading boats, trucks, from slapping mortar on bricks.

Bucky has hands like that. Shorter fingers than Steve's, but muscled and hard, with callouses that he'd massage vasline into, trying to soften them and sooth the cracked and irritated flesh.

Steve had - has - two distinct callouses, one on the inside of his middle finger where his pencils rest, the other on his thumb. Even the serum couldn't seem to vanish those away, and he's grateful - they remind him who he is.

His other scars have vanished: everything from the white line above his eyebrow to the jagged cut on his belly from when they'd taken his appendix out when he was eight. Anything, it seems, that would reflect some kind of imperfection.

Super soliders don't have weaknesses. They do not wheeze with asthma. They see in technicolor, all reds and blues and golden yellow. Incidental hurts heal without a second thought.

Maybe, Steve thinks, it's just that no one sees a callous as a weakness. It's physical proof of hard work, of discipline. Good soliders who line up for their duty, who do their calisthenics, who sing and dance on stage.

Outside the dingy bathroom, he can hear the stage manager shouting the five minute warning. He gives himself one last hard look in the mirror - _get it together, Rogers_ \- all tousled cowlicked hair and all, sees the veins on his hands standing out from how hard he's been holding onto the sink.

Faint blue and purple, webbed along the backs of his hands.

Funny, he thinks. The blood is all different. The veins are the same.


	23. Wandlore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exolvo universe.

**Wandlore**

*

You are busy (always busy, every busy) writing orders neatly in the dusty ledger on the afternoon that Anna Arendelle first visits his shop. The little bell at the door jingles merrily, the quiet room filling with the shuffling of footsteps, quiet adult murmurs, and a young voice - girl, just turned eleven, small but willful, whose excitement you can hear before you even turns the corner.

The young ones, they are always excited.

Wand-making is brisk business of course; even though it is the ambition of many to keep their first wand, there is always a need. Repair, replacement, retirement of an old and well-loved friend. There are many, many reasons an adult might need a new wand.

But children though.

Your first wand, it is always the best.

You push through the half-door that separates the front of the shop from the back, wriggle your spectacles back into position on the bridge of your nose, and raise one hand just in time to catch one slim box as it comes flying off the wall.

“Ah,” you say. “You are exciting my stock already, miss. What is your name?”

(You know her name. You know all their names, and their parents, their brothers and sisters. You know their wands, and so you know them.)

“Anna,” she says promptly, leaning in unconsciously toward the box you hold in your hand. “I start Hogwarts in the fall.”

“Do you now,” you say mildly. “And which House do you think you will belong to?” Anna pauses then, long enough for you to pull out your measuring tape, and run the length of it up her arm, from the top of her head to the floor, around her wrist.

“Slytherin, I think,” she says cheerfully, eyes following the silver strip of tape snake across her face.

You glance up then - she is not a Slytherin, not this girl; she’s too open, heart and mind on her sleeves, on her face. In the corner of the room, her parents shift slightly closer together, and her mother’s fingers tighten just a little on her father’s arm.

They are quiet though - they know how this goes, how you must wait to see.

“Slytherin, hmm?”

“Oh yes,” Anna continues. “My sister is in Slytherin. We’ll be in the same House naturally. That’s common.”

“So I hear,” you say, and begin pulling boxes off the wall.  “Here, try this one.”

The dance begins.

Anna’s first wand - Chestnut, ten inches, dragon-heartstring core - is a clear no: when she gives it a hopeful wave, it shoots out of her hand and goes clattering under a table.

You have the next ready, and the next after that, handing them off dutifully while Anna raises them above her head, swishes and flicks, points out this or that feature to her mother and father.

It troubles you, to hear the sister is in Slytherin; you remember Elsa Arendelle as clearly as you remember all the children who come into your shop - quiet but not shy, reserved. You have never seen a child so desperate to try and so afraid at the same time, eagerness hidden in the depths of her eyes, fingers shaking so hard when you handed her the first wand that she almost couldn’t take hold of it.

Taking a wand into hand to perform willful magic, to shift the elements, to bend your world to your will - it is not a thing to take lightly.  Timidity is common, even for magic born children - meeting their wand is the first step into practical magic; it is a far greater thing than simply watching one’s mother and father, older sibilings and relatives.

It is why your shop is at the end of the street. You are where the innocence of childhood ends, where each new witch and wizard picks up the instrument that will shape their fledgling adulthood.

Elsa Arendelle. Hawthorn, thirteen inches, unicorn-hair core, swishy. A more unique wand, strength and subtle power, built for defence, for protection, for healing. It is not a Slytherin’s wand, though you have been wrong about these things before.

You rummage in your memory, and hand Anna wands, one after the other, until _finally_  -

The shop fills with warm light when Anna’s fingers close around the wood, diffused and gentle at first, growing brighter and brighter until she is hard to see except for the flaming tips of her red braids; she is alight with magic, full to the brim with it so it overflows.

“Ah now, there we’ve got it,” you say, and gently lift it from her outstretched hand. “Let’s get this in a box now, shall we?”

“What is it?” Anna asks as you run a rag briskly over the dusty box. She is still small enough to need to be on tip-toes to see your counter, but that’s no mind.

Small means nothing in the world of wands, after all. This you know.

“Hornbeam. Stubborn, very,”you begin, and at this, Anna’s father stifles what might be a laugh, “but powerful too. If you have the will to master a hornbeam wand, very little will stop you. Phoenix tail feather. Versatile and power again, yes. Good for Defense Against the Dark Arts.”

You finish wrapping the box and slide it across the counter. Anna takes is carefully, passing you a little bag of coins, and looks at you once before ducking out the door with her parent’s, eyes wide.

A child’s first wand. It is always the best.

You shuffle back to your paperwork - it is late, there will be no more children today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I trolled around Pottermore for the wand elements, but honestly there are about a bazillion combinations that could work for either girl. 
> 
> Anyway, I like Hawthorn for Elsa for it’s emphasis on protective properties strength in DADA and because it is slightly rarer. The actual hawthorn tree tends to have thorny branches, which I think is apt, because Elsa puts up all kinds of barriers, but the flowers and fruit are actually very lovely if you can get close enough to see them.
> 
> For Anna, I like Hornbeam because it’s a stubborn wood. Anna has as powerful will, and once set on a path she is not easily moved from it. (however I almost chose Cherry for her, for it’s cheerful willingness and generally congenial nature).


	24. X-Factor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chiralities.

**X-Factor**

*

They told her when she signed up that there would be sacrifices.

 _You will be in enemy territory_ , they said.  _You will be cut off from the strength of the armed forces._

What they mean is: you will be alone. You will be alone, and we will not be able to help you.

In the beginning, it’s a line item on her paycheck that Peggy hummed and tapped it with her pencil while they sat, in a dripping and miserable tent somewhere south of Austria, heads bent over their combined paperwork.

“That is not enough for this,” she’d said, half-joking, half-serious,  waving the stubby pencil around at the soggy canvas. “It’s incredible more men don’t get sick. Too many do already, but - ” she sighs then, and rubs her hands on the damp wool of her coat, shivering a little.

Anna doesn’t feel the cold so much anymore, not really, but she can still get  _wet_. In her boots, her socks squelched against her toes, and she grimaced before peering closer at neatly typed lines.

“What is that, anyway?” she'd asked. “No one ever told me what all of this means.”

“It’s the ‘x-factor’: extra pay for the dangers for people in the military that civilians do not face, for which they receive payment.” She said this with a straightened spine and an air of recitation: her SSR officer's voice, all military and propriety, then ruins it by winking.

“They compensate us for being miserable,” Anna said flatly, trying hard (and partially succeeding) to keep from sounding too incredulous.

“Well,” Peggy said, leaning back now with her elbows. “It’s the getting shot at, the ever present threat of death and capture, the bombs and the evil scientists.”

“You do have a gift for understatement, has anyone told you?”

"I'm British dear, of course they have."

~

The Howlers spend a lot of time alone.

Anna doesn’t think about the x-factor again, because it’s war and it’s danger and her paychecks are just sitting crumpled in the bottom of her backpack anyway, ink getting smudged and the numbers piling up uselessly as they tromp through the beast of Europe in the winter.

So who cares that they’re getting shot at.

They’re missing, that’s what matters.

“You’re crazy, you know that? Jumping off cliffs and things. You gotta be crazy.” Olaf tells her one night, when they’re all crouched around a low fire, grinning like mad men, high on the thrill of another HYDRA base down, and Anna is telling them stories from her childhood while Elsa balances on her heels beside her.

“She thinks she’s invincible,” Elsa says, and her voice is low and fond and just a tiny bit exasperated. “Even when she was a tiny thing.”

“I’m sorry miss,” Olaf chuckles (he calls her miss, Miss Anna, Princess, to make her laugh; once, he built a snowman for her in the great drifts that piled up from the wind behind an overturned tank, set a pair of goggles on it and everything.) “I just can’t see you as small.”

Anna just pokes the fire and grins, because this is living, this is hardly a hardship - saving people, ending the war, marching with Elsa at her right hand. It is nothing like being alone.

She is wrong.

_The x-factor. Compensation for indeterminate hardship. Sign the dotted line miss, we’re in a hurry here._

Perhaps it’s too many impossible things.

Too many leaps of faith.

Turns out, it’s a train, steel and coal breaking the winter air; too real.

It’s snow, and her shield, and the interminable rush of falling in her ears, in her eyes, and Elsa’s fingers reaching up,  _up_.

There is no amount of money to soothe this pain.

No one can pay enough to make her whole again.


	25. Your Mileage May Vary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chiralities verse.

**Your Mileage May Vary**

*

“I don’t understand this,” Elsa says one day, flopping the newspaper she was reading down on the kitchen table. Anna looks up from where she’s half-buried in a stack of pancakes (if there is something about this body that will never get old, it’s the ability to gorge oneself on pancakes with maple sugar and chocolate sauce, positively dripping in butter and sugar.)

Times used to be tough. Emphasis on _used_ \- there are no sugar rations in 2014, and while a lot of things in this new century still strike her as odd and out of place, the ability to totally indulge on the sweets is not something she is going to complain about.

So she likes her pancakes and coffee sugary. Sue her. Whatever.

“What don’t you understand?” Anna asks carefully, then slowly takes a sip of her milk. Asking Elsa what she doesn’t understand is a fraught question lately. They’re in this strange middle ground, where she’s neither usually one thing or another; even when the answer was always bad, terrible, violent and just plain awful, at least it was something expected.

Nowadays Elsa flits unpredictably between wondering innocuous things (why is there an entire channel for wrestling) to exploring the dangerous and dark. Anna remembers the glittering anger, the clenched fists, the dent in the doorframe from when they’d had a tense, clipped discussion about unmanned drones.

Anna is never going to get over seeing the shadow of the Winter Soldier behind Elsa’s angry expressions, or the way she sometimes walks, all stalking menace, posture shrieking for people to _get away, stay away_. It’s a punch to the heart, every single time.

Well. She never did learn how to duck properly.

Thankfully, the look Elsa gives her now is more general confusion than ‘I don’t know where I belong in my own head’, and she points to a column in the paper.

“YMMV? Is this code?”

 _No_ , Anna thinks, biting the inside of her cheek when she sees what Elsa’s been reading. _It’s a gossip column_.

“It’s an acronym,” Anna says, suppressing her grin. Elsa’s catching up just like she did, but it’s still amusing to see her studied, intellectual sister binging on People Magazine and E!. Elsa hates it, vocally, loudly and often, but she’s plowing through. “It means Your Mileage May Vary.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I think it has to do with gas mileage?” Anna offers, and after a moment, they both sort of look at each other and shrug.

“What about this one?” Elsa points to another spot on the page. “LMAO?”

“Laughing My Ass Off,” Anna supplies gleefully. “Natasha taught me that one.”

“Naturally,” Elsa mutters, rolling her eyes and sliding into the adjacent seat at the table. “Pass the syrup.”

 

 


	26. Zed

**Zed**

*

“Ho ho,” said the spider to the fly. “I see you sitting there, looking at my web. Won’t you come and play?”

“Oh no,” replied the fly, and he shuffled his wings together against his back, for he was cold and nervous, and that is what flies do. “You will catch me, then you will wrap me up and eat me, and I will be dead.”

The spider, if she’d had lips to smile with, would have grinned then, but had to be satisfied with pinching her pincers together and listening to them click and snap.

“You are too smart for me, little fly,” she said, and tapped one dainty foot against the silvery strand of web. “But see, this web is not for catching, for eating. It is for chatting with old friends.”

“I don’t believe you,” said the fly. He was smart, smart as flies go anyway, and he’d seen what happened to other insects when they met the spider, how they thrashed, how they died. He was afraid of the web, and afraid of her, big eyes and pincers that glittered together in the evening light.

“Oh, don’t be scared of me,” crooned the spider. “I do not even like to eat flies; you taste like the ground and the dirt, and of hot garbage in Junes and Julys.”

The fly was not offended. He was a fly, and they buzzed and they circled, and they very often smelled like hot garbage in Junes and Julys, and he could not be bothered to be angry with the truth.

Still, he did not believe her.

“I think I will stay here,” he said, and made a quick circle around her web, to show her how fast he could be. “We are talking now, as you see.”

The spider, if she’d had lips to frown with, would have frowned, for this was an unusually smart little fly, and she was hungry.

She lied, of course she’d lied; spiders do not care about the taste of their food, only that it crunches and snaps, and maybe sometimes cries.

“Oh, but I could hear you so much better,” she said, silk and smooth as her web. “And I could see your face, and see your eyes when you spoke, and that is what I do so enjoy about a conversation.”

The fly paused then, hovering, because he was vain about his eyes, for they were large and they had many colors, and he could see very much with them.

“Would you really like to see me speak?” He asked, cautious, and not nearly cautious enough, coming closer, too close. “I could perhaps sit on this branch and you could see me then.”

“That would be fine, little fly,” said the spider, and she curled in on herself, tucking her legs under her body, so that she would look small.

So the fly perched on a nearby branch, and felt the green living bark beneath his feet - so unlike refuse in Junes and Julys - and he thought maybe the spider had the right idea, living in the trees.

“A little closer dear,” whispered the spider. “I have many eyes, but it is because my sight is so poor, you see. And I am old; they do not work so well anymore.”

She was lying, because the spiders always lie. She was young, and for a spider she was beautiful: sleek and black, with long thin legs and a marvelous bulb of a belly, and she was fierce as anything.

“Oh, alright,” said the fly, and he inched a little closer.

“A little closer please?” Asked the spider, and she coughed a little, because she could.

“Oh no,” said the fly. “I think I have done enough talking today.” And away he went, for he was smart as flies go, and he was far too close, too close to the spider. “But I might come back tomorrow.”

But he was still a fly, after all.

The next day, the spider saw the fly, and they talked, and the fly came a little closer, and the spider would have grinned even wider, if she had lips to grin with.

And so it went for some time.

“My dearest,” said the spider, one afternoon in a what might have been a June or a July, or maybe even an April (and what is time to insects? perhaps it was a Thursday, or a Friday.) “I am getting so old, please come sit near me on my web. I would like to be near you when I die.”

The spider was very good at lying, and the fly was only a fly after all.

“Do you promise you will not snag me, and catch me, and eat me?”

“I promise,” said the spider, solemnly, with two of her legs crossed in the back. “My web is safe.”

So the fly came down and he, was, as everyone knows, immediately caught by the sticky, silky strands.

“You lied, you lied!” He wailed, thrashing, just like all the other flies he’d seen. “You promised you would not catch me.”

“Oh little fly,” said the spider, and she was very close, very close to him now, and he could see her glinting teeth, and see her shining eyes, and the finest patch of red on her belly. “You should never have trusted a spider.”

~

Somewhere, in another place:

“Natasha, I swear to god that is the creepiest bedtime story I’ve ever heard.”

~

The end. 


End file.
